I. Field
The following description relates generally to wireless communications and more particularly to scheduling communication in a multi-hop wireless network.
II. Background
Wireless communication networks are utilized to communicate information regardless of where a user may be located (e.g., inside or outside) and regardless of whether the user is mobile or stationary. Wireless communication networks enable communication between a mobile device and with a base station or access point. The access point covers a geographic range or cell and, as a mobile device is operated, the mobile device may be moved in and out of these geographic cells. To achieve virtually uninterrupted communication, the mobile device is assigned resources of a cell it has entered and is de-assigned resources of the cell it has exited.
In a multi-hop topology, a communication or transmission is transferred through a number of hops instead of directly to a base station. A hop as referred to herein is a particular segment or leg of a communication path between a sender and a recipient wherein another device acts as a relay node to facilitate conveyance of the communication. In cellular systems, resource contention is typically on a per “cell” basis and fairness of resource sharing is handled per base station. In multi-hop wireless networks, resource contention may be over a large number of nodes. Traditional methods (e.g., 802.11's Carrier Sense Multiple Access Medium Access Control (CSMA MAC)) can be utilized to ensure fairness on an immediate “hop” basis, but not necessarily over all the hops that the packet traverses.
To overcome the aforementioned as well as other deficiencies, what is needed is a technique for providing fair scheduling over all the hops from source node to destination node (e.g., over the entire data path) in a multi-hop network.